Only rights that protect
men have been extended to women.Important rights that affect women only have been invisible."Atrocities committed against women are
either too human to fit the notion of female or too female to fit the notion of
human."(p. 528)What does this mean[WJT1]?

MacKinnon thinks that
there are many kinds of invisible human rights violations against women:

The Bosnia-Herzogovina
example:"[T]he rapes are an
instrument of war."(531)Ethnic cleansing:Rape
as genocide.At the time, there was no
precedent for trying sexual atrocities in international law[WJT6].

Prosecutions in Bosnia-Herzogovina were the result of women from outside the
country taking a role in interviewing victims.Human rights develop when a group that has previously been silenced finds
a voice.

THE CRUCIAL ANALOGY:The analogy between violence in a civil war
and violence in the private sphere:state sovereignty and family sovereignty.("A man's home is his castle[WJT8].")

Conclusion:"[V]iolence against women violates human rights."(540)

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE PRIVATE
SPHERE:RAO ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

1.The "two spheres" theory makes a
sharp distinction between public (outside the family) and private (within the
family) spheres[WJT9].

2.The limitation of rights to the public
sphere.(For more, see Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family[WJT10].)

The example of Rawls's Original Position
behind the 'veil of ignorance'.Consider a further generalization of Rawls’s idea:The Intergalactic Original Position.Explain why it makes sense to think of the
self in the intergalactic original position as a "denatured, dehistoricized, disembodied, disembedded,
individual self".Is this a
problem, from a moral point of view?

4.The Two
Spheres:Public and Private[WJT15].Rao's argument on
the status of the family in human rights documents:There is a large category of rights missing
from the UNUDHR[WJT16].

5.Does Rao think the problem is better understood as a
"conceptual contradiction" or "strategic inadequacy[WJT17]" (523)?What
do you think?

[WJT10]Published
1989:criticism of Rawls:basic institutions, but assumed households 1971;
1993 he acknowledged that theory applies to family, but said nothing about it;
finally in 2001 he addressed the family in "Justice as Fairness".